Scheduled nap times may help eliminate the problem of air-traffic controllers who fall asleep on the job. But even if such measures were in place, they would have done little to prevent the brief but worrisome aborted landing of a U.S. Air Force jet carrying First Lady Michelle Obama on April 18 after it got too close to a cargo plane ahead of it. The reason: the blips of the aircraft involved had momentarily vanished from radar.
The nation’s airspace radar system is half a century old and hasn’t been able to produce the necessary data to keep up with the volume of traffic in America’s skies. Indeed, the blips, each of which indicates a plane in the air, refresh only every 4.7 seconds, degrade the farther the aircraft is from the control tower and don’t travel through mountains. But new technology is coming online to do away with the system’s limitations. In fact, in March the Federal Aviation Administration released its implementation plan for a whole new system, which is slowly being rolled out and is expected to be completely in place by the year 2020.
